Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Philips Hue Festavia String Lights Review”.
Hey I’m Justin Tech and I’m super excited today, because I’m showing off the Philips Hue Christmas lights that are called festavia. You really, you really can’t say it unless you say it like that anyway, I love Philips Hue lighting. I have them all around my apartment, so adding this to a Christmas tree along with all my Philips Hue Lights is going to be super special, so cute tree. Oh, we have a tree right here. Um we’ve got a nice.
Six footer probably needs some water. So we’ll we’ll put some water down below as well, but uh, let’s start putting these on Bobby. Can you help me with this right? He get okay cool. Let’S do it all right cool, I think that’s the take. We do. The Vestavia string lights came out. Just last month, adding to Philips Hue’s, already large catalog of smart home lighting, they come in one length 65 feet with 250 LED lights, that connect together using a similar cable to Hue’s outdoor fixtures. But to be clear, these lights are not waterproof, which is a bit of a bummer.
This one set was more than long enough to fit my six foot tree. I bet that you can even put this on a tree. That’S another foot or two taller when you’re hanging these.
You have to start from the bottom and go to the top and make sure that when you reach the top, you don’t have too much left over, because if you do and you try to put them around the tree lower, it will mess with the gradient feature Which I’m going to show you in a bit? It is time for the Moment of Truth. It is time to plug these in Vestavia Leviosa. Yes, oh my God, that’s so fun and colorful.
Oh, my God. I love it so much! This is so exciting. I can’t wait to test it out we’re gon na put ornaments over this and I need a star, but I don’t have a star, but what I do have is a wine bottle.
So let’s use that it looks really good. I actually love the lights in the bottle, like that. The Hue Lights connect to the Hue app either over Bluetooth or to the Hue bridge.
I personally use the Hue Bridge because I’m able to add all of my lights to that customize it and get a lot of other features, and I can control my Hue Lights outside of the home. Once the lights are connected, you can place them in any room or Zone and start controlling them. My number one tip would be to give the tree its own room at first.
I set it up to be in the living room, which makes sense it’s in the living room, but I noticed that when I wanted to control the living room and turn off all the lights, it also turned off the tree, which usually I want all the living Room lights to turn off, but keep the tree on. So what I did was. I gave the tree its own room.
That way. If I want to turn off the living room lights, I can still do that. Do whatever I want with those and it won’t affect the tree and vice versa? Now, let’s get into all the customization. There are some new features specifically designed for these string lights. There are three style types for the string lights, there’s linear, which creates a gradient using three colors from the top to the bottom, there’s mirrored, which also use uses three colors, but creates a gradient from the top and bottom that meet in the center and then there’s Scattered which lets you choose up to five colors and have them scatter all around the tree. You can also double up on Colors by dragging them over on top of each other.
There are three pre-programmed effects for these string lights, which really isn’t that much especially when you look at competitors like twinkly that have a plethora of effects that are, in some ways pretty crazy. But it’s cool to have that option. The first two effects are candle and fireplace these two were already on the app and can be used with other fixtures. A new one that was added for these string lights is called Sparkle. Where the lights you guessed it they sparkle. Now I really love the look of all three of these effects on the tree, but unfortunately, you can’t change the speed at which they go or the color, which I feel like could be a pretty easy thing to ingrain in the app and it’s just not there And it feels a bit limited overall. I really think that Hue needs to be bringing more effects to their app for these string lights and their gradient fixtures, which, by the way, I am coming out with another best of hue video stay tuned. For that I’ll be showing off a bunch of the gradient fixtures and it’s going to be awesome aside from those three pre-programmed effects. There are also Dynamic scenes, and now these are scenes that can play off of any scene that you’ve created that cycle through different colors. So, theoretically, you do have Limitless scenes with these Dynamic effects, foreign and just like all Philips Hue fixtures. These string lights are smart. They work with all the main voice – assistants, Google, Amazon and Siri.
So you can do something like this set the tree to Green, pretty basic, but still very cool. Even cooler, though I found a way to activate the dynamic scenes from Philips Hue that you create using your voice. If you have an iPhone, you can create a Siri shortcut to activate a dynamic scene by saying something like this start festive, and it’s going to start my red and green Dynamic scene. There you go aside from those effects, is the ability to sync them with music or stuff on your TV, using entertainment areas to sync music, you need to use Spotify Spotify is ingrained right in the Hue app on the sync tab. You can tap to open, Spotify and play a song Once the music is playing and you sync the lights. You can adjust the style to a pulse or classic change the intensity, the brightness and the color scheme. Unfortunately, you can’t go in and create your own color schemes. There are only a few to choose from, and I hope that you includes that in the future, where you can use the color wheel to select a few different colors that you want to play with the music, especially if you have a themed party.
If it’s a holiday you’re going to want to keep the colors consistent with your other decorations now, this may sound a bit extra, but you can also sync your tree with the content on the TV using an HDMI sync box from Philips Hue. This device allows you to hook up any gaming console or streaming device to it via HDMI, and it will sync all of that. To your TV, with the lights playing movies also looks great. You can adjust the brightness and intensity of the lights based on what you’re watching.
If you want to learn more about the HDMI sync box, I did review that on YouTube. So you should go. Look that up overall, I’m really happy with these lights.
They sync so nicely into my Philips Hue ecosystem and that’s kind of why I keep getting Philips Hue just for the ease of use in the app I will say, though they are a bit limited compared to their competitor. Twinkly twinkly comes in a bunch of sizes, and you can link multiple together to get a full coat that work together with the effects they’re also waterproof, so you can use them outside. Twinkly does have a lot of customization and a lot of effects that you can download from the app but Philips Hue does have the ability to sync to a TV to music and to create all those Dynamic scenes.
So you are getting a lot here. I just I think, for them to be a real Contender, Philips Hue. I think they need to be adding more into that effects more than candle fire and the sparkle. On top of that, I’d love to be able to change those colors as well.
That’S all I’ve got for you today. I do have another Hue video coming out the best of you showing off a ton of cool fixtures and gradient and stuff. You don’t want to miss that be sure to subscribe to our Channel click that Bell for alerts and I’ve got to put on some ornaments, so we’re gon na cut this video, I’m Justin and I’ll. Take you later .